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Comment by tlear | Hacker News Reader

If you ever dealt with any "preservation" types in Canada you would know why all of those guys said NO, more like F NO. They could find a piece of brick(our put one there), assign a department, probably get a 1mil budget, dig up your whole land then ban you from using it forever.

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> They could find a piece of brick (or put one there)

So the claim here seems to be: A university archeologist may decide to place a (modern) brick in your backyard, which they will use to support their claim that it's an archeological site, so that they can have the opportunity to waste thousands of combined hours of work and a million dollars of their undersized budget digging up a site that they don't actually think has any artifacts of interest. To which I say:

What?

Ok I exaggerated about the brick ;)

I used to be a part of volunteer group that "lobbied" for climbing access so I had a lot of exposure to that bureaucracy.

I guarantee you that no backyard trench dig is getting 1m budgets and an entire department. Usually even being able to afford basic tools like up-to-date imagery is problematic.

I think in general this ends up being the same market failure the original post alluded to - there's tail risk of someone actually finding something, declaring your property a landmark/historical site which severely limits the possible use thus negatively impacts the value of your property... with zero compensation to you. Rational response there should be F NO.

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